1. Control a 3D printer

However, in the past it's often been necessary to wire the Pi to intermediate boards capable of talking to the piece of hardware you wanted to control.

To work with these boards and hardware the Pi swaps data via its general purpose input-output (GPIO) pins, with information encoded as high or low voltage electrical signals.

The B+ upgrades the main interface the Pi uses to talk to other hardware, by increasing the number of pins on the board from 26 to 40, and in doing so expands the range of hardware that can directly connect to the Pi.

On the Raspberry Pi blog there is talk of using the new B+ Pi to control a 3D printer directly, thanks to the B+ having sufficient GPIO pins to run the stepper motors that position the print head. However connecting a 3D printer is just one possible mod that just got simpler.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Upton said the upgrades in the B+ makes it easier to attach many more pieces of hardware directly to the board.

"From the extra GPIO, you can control that many more things from the device without having to use a port expander. It broadens out the range of things you can drive directly," said Upton.

"The Broadcom chip we're using has a couple of interfaces called DPI, an LCD panel interface, and SMI, secondary memory interface, which is a very powerful, generic way of talking to peripherals.

"With this new 40-pin connector you'll be able to get all of the pins on there that you need to do DPI or SMI interfaces

"There are a lot of things that you can plug into the SMI. Basically, it's a generic parallel bus," he said, giving the example of an additional USB or Ethernet controller or a top board with a field programmable gate array.

2. Take pictures at the edge of space

The B+ makes the Pi better suited for being wired into battery-powered gear, such as high altitude camera rigs, thanks to swapping out its onboard power regulators for a more efficient alternative.

The upgrade replaces linear regulators with switching ones, which reduces power consumption by between 0.5W and 1W.

"The high altitude ballooning guys are really going to benefit from this. They already disembowel their Pis before they go up and replace the power supply with something quite similar to what we've done with this version," said Upton.

"That's driving the power consumption down so it lasts longer on the little batteries you can afford to put under a weather balloon. Those people are really going to benefit because it's going to work for them out of the box."

He added that those firms building products that use an embedded Pi would also benefit from the new regulators due to the reduced consumption and waste heat.

3. Run as a computer out of the box

The Pi's was created as a low-cost computer for kids to learn about coding, so simplicity is a must.

The B+ board makes it easier to just plug peripherals into the Pi and start using them, thanks to upgrades to the USB ports.

The number of ports has been increased from two to four and the ports are now able to provide power to a wider range of peripherals, such as small external hard disk drives and WiFi dongles.

"A lot of the educational users who are just using it as a computer are going to benefit both from the extra USB ports and from the power improvements," said Upton.

"People are going to be able to use it without the powered [USB] hub for a much broader range of applications."

"The USB powerchain has a proper limiting switch and will not brown out the board if USB devices are plugged in when powered (or even if they try to take too much current or there is a fault like a power short). Default allowed USB current across 4 ports is 600mA, but can be increased to 1.2A via a config.txt parameter if a good quality 2A PSU (power supply unit) is used," he wrote.

4. Make beautiful music

The desire to get high fidelity sound out of the Pi has led to the creation of dedicated add-on boards, such as the HiFiBerry.

The B+ aims to improve the quality of the Pi's audio by incorporating a dedicated "low-noise" power supply.